Welcome to Life by You’s first official blog post!

We look forward to sharing new content, providing updates, and offering sneak peeks into the development process through these blog posts, and we’d like to get that started with a popular topic: Life stages. 

We’ve received a lot of questions about which life stages will be available in Life by You, both at Early Access and full release, as well as how those life stages will impact gameplay, how your characters will age, and more. So let’s address some of these, and bring you the latest on where we are in the dev cycle.

What life stages will be available for Early Access?

Teens, Adults and Elders are targeted to be available at the start of Early Access.

We are still hard at work to determine if Children will be available at the start of Early Access. This will depend on how development of child visuals and bug fixing goes over the next few months. We have already created content for children, and also feel that the gameplay is rewarding, however we need time to bring visual charm and make sure that this life stage is working properly.

Infants and toddlers will be included in the base game eventually and we have designed our systems with them in mind. Both have been prototyped and playtested in development, but need additional polish and design to reach what we consider to be an acceptable quality bar for gameplay depth and visuals. The team strongly believes that these life stages are important to the player experience and absolutely belong in the base game in order for the game to be considered feature complete. We will continue to update you on a timeline for these life stages as they develop.

What life stages will be eventually included in the base game?

Infant, Toddler, Child, Teen, Adult, Elder will all be included in the base game eventually.

How will aging work, is it gradual or in stages?

Right now aging follows the progression of in-game time and each human will have a birthday every year and go up 1 year in age. Visuals and animations are tied to life stages themselves and will update when a new life stage is achieved. We are still fine tuning the visuals across all of the life stages in the game right now. We can’t wait to see what you think of aging, so this is a major area where we will be watching player feedback during Early Access.

What will be the unique elements to each life stage? Is school a thing for kids/teens?

We are still adding lots of content to the game between now and Early Access and will continue to add content throughout the Early Access process. This includes adding a lot more life stage specific content! Find some specific elements to each life stage below.

Interactions Right now we are working on making sure interactions are age appropriate to the life stage’s capabilities. The types of interactions a child versus an adult or elder will differ.  Our system lets us select for which life stages or combination of life stages an interaction appears.

For example: Only teens and older will be able to cook the full range of recipes (we want to make sure they’re careful around sharp objects and open flames!).

Conversations There will be conversation options and content related specifically to each life stage. Getting unique life stage content was very important to us in developing conversations, and age specific content will be expanded throughout Early Access to add more variety and specific cases.

For example: The way kids speak is age appropriate and unique to a kid’s interests. There are also conversations related specifically to child and parent-guardian relationships in the game.

School vs Jobs Only adults can go to work and perform jobs/careers. There are plans for a children’s school to be added eventually and will likely follow a similar gameplay system to jobs, not be a rabbit hole.

University gameplay is not currently planned for the base game as it's a deep topic with a lot of design implications for the game. We want to make sure we have a solution for this specific case.

Transportation There are age appropriate transportation options for children, teens, and adults onwards.  This includes tricycles, bikes and skateboards for kids to get around, with cars unlocking at an older age.

Dating and relationships Dating will unlock specifically between teens at the teen life stage and specifically between adults at the adult life stage. The options and tone of dating differs from teenage sweethearts to adult dating, marriage and romantic relationships. This includes custom conversation options and content for those life stages.

Thank you all so much for all of your questions and support since our announcement!

The team has had a fantastic time reading through your comments, watching your videos, and prepping new content for you all. We have so much more to share with all before Early Access, so be sure to stay tuned.

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